DH2i has adapted the technology from their core Smart Availabiilty offering for container management to solving a problem experienced by their customers. They are demonstrating it this week at the PASS Summit 2018 in Seattle.
Don Boxley, DH2i’s CEO and Co-Founder
Container management software vendor DH2i has made a pivot into software-defined networking security, adapting the Smart Availability technology that is at the heart of their core software offering to address a problem experience by their customers – and by many organizations who have not been their customers. DH2i is positioning their new DxOdyssey software as a replacement for VPNs to the cloud, and believe that the simplicity and efficiency of their solution will let it disrupt the cloud VPN market, and add many new customers who have not been using their main product.
“DxOdyssey is super-important to us,” said said Don Boxley, DH2i’s CEO and Co-Founder. “We’ve always been focused on Smart Availability, making workloads portable from any host to any host anytime. Customers said that it worked great as long as they were within their own security infrastructure, but that is soon as they went outside it, using a VPN, it breaks. What they wanted was a way to pipe it to the cloud, in a secure way.”
DxOdyssey is network security software that dynamically deploys perimeter security through a Software-Defined Perimeter, to provide Zero Trust network connectivity between on-premises sites and multi-cloud environments.
“No one was coming at the problem from the same perspective that we are,” Boxley said. “We thought we could bring some uniqueness to solving the problem because we address unique challenges that a networking person wouldn’t think out. We picked off parts of the problem earlier, but didn’t commit to solving the whole thing, because we had other things we wanted to do first, like supporting Linux. We finally put together this new security software to address the problem.”
Micro-segmentation is critical to the DxOdyssey.
“Vendors talk about segmenting at the NETWORK level, but what we have done is set up DTLS-encrypted application-level micro-tunnels to segment connections to different services,” Boxley said. “The micro-tunnels are also self-healing and highly available, so that if one gateway fails, it all fails over, so the environment is always secure and always on.” The perimeter can also be orchestrated to change dynamically so that micro-tunnels and workloads always find their best execution venue.
DxOdyssey uses non-standard UDP ports for the micro-tunnel communications in order to eliminate lateral network attacks.
“We use UDP rather than TCP, which has lower latency, but is less reliable because it doesn’t have any correction capability built into it natively like TCP does,” Boxley said. “So we added a TCP-like correction capability to it, creating our own proprietary system. The bad guys have stuff designed for TCPs, which won’t work here. It’s not an insurmountable problem for them, but they will have to do some engineering.
“There are no VPNs in this process at all,” Boxley added. “We extend shielding on the fly to protect the perimeter. Because the perimeter is software-defined, it integrates into the existing network infrastructure without the need for reconfiguration.”
While the Smart Availability technology from DH2i’s DxEnterprise(DxE) Smart Availability software is critical to DxOdyssey, DxOdyssey is a separate, standalone product that is purchased separately. DxE is not necessary in order to use DxOdyssey, and Boxley thinks most people who buy them will not even be DxE users.
“I think the bulk will come from new customers who are concerned about how to build a hybrid, secure multi-cloud environment, who want something better than VPNs,” Boxley said. “Everyone is talking about a better way than VPNs, but we think we have that here. We think we will win our fair share of business just because of the simplicity, and the fact that it can be done in minutes. Doing what we do here with major vendors would be a major project, and super-expensive. We are already seeing major excitement from our channel partners.”
DH2i will be doing live demonstrations of DxOdyssey as well as its DxE software for Windows Server and Linux Server databases and stateful Docker containers, at this week’s PASS Summit in Seattle, at Booth # 401.
